


If It Please You, My Lady

by SanSanFanFan



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Innuendo, King's Landing, Letters, Love, Post Riot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 11:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2579849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SanSanFanFan/pseuds/SanSanFanFan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sandor finds himself writing letters to Sansa...</p>
            </blockquote>





	If It Please You, My Lady

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mermaidsahoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mermaidsahoy/gifts).



> Written for Mermaidsahoy who wanted a letters fic set in King's Landing :D
> 
> A part of the SSFF birthday gift fic thing

Sandor gripped the quill as though it was one of his daggers and scored a thick black line of ink through the few words he had managed to write. Bugger this!

He pushed the parchment away and sat back heavily in his chair.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t shape the bloody words. He had a fair enough hand after his father had drummed it into the maester that his boys should never bring shame on their house, even one as lowly as theirs, by mangling their letters. And the maester had taken that drumming and raised it to a beating when he’d exchanged his b’s for d’s. No, he could make fair shapes if he was called to. Not as fair as hers perhaps, and he would not bother with those buggering elaborate looping and flowing shapes she seemed to like. 

But he could get words onto parchment… if he knew which fucking words to write!

He still knew her first letter off by heart, so often he had read it. The original was a crumpled, pitiful thing, buried deep within his mattress after he’d torn open a tiny part of the seam and stuffed it in there. Some nights he heard it crinkle there, with all the others, as sleep evaded him and he turned over again. Evading him because he was too bloody busy trying to string together his own bloody responses.

_I should have come to you after. To thank you, for saving me. You were so brave._

When he’d first read those words he had imagined her saying them to him in some lonely corridor of the keep, her blues eyes staring up at him as she gathered those courtesies to praise the dog… as though he bloody needed her praise! And he’d seen himself snarl back at her…. barking out something about the men not being a fucking challenge, how he’d hadn’t needed to be bloody brave!

But she hadn’t steeled herself to speak to him in the keep. She’d found parchment, a quill, ink… and the courage to get her small letter to him. He’d found it, folded up into a tiny thing, wedged in between his heavy wooden door and the frame at a very low height. Anyone else would have walked past it. But the dog was always on his fucking guard wasn’t he?

It’d taken him a week to write a response, and even then the angry words had still been trying to come out. 

_Brave? I wasn’t being brave girl!_

_I don’t need fucking courage to chase off rats!_

But he would scare her. Maybe he should scare her. Get her to roll up that parchment and put away that bloody quill. Get her to stop before someone else read what the little bird was putting on paper for the Hound. Gratitude could get her killed.

So finally he had written a short, curt note.

_I protected the King’s betrothed. Do not write again._

But the next day there was another note waiting for him.

_I do not love him._

That one had damn near killed him. And if anyone else had found it she would have been done for as well! Five words and a wellspring of sadness behind them. But she was a fool… who did wed for love? She would go to her wedding bed with tears in her eyes, and she would not be the first. Nor the last. 

_Practice the words they want to hear. Sing them if you have to. No one can know._

He’d hoped that would be the end of it. And half hoped it wasn’t. When the longer note was stuck into his door, a queer lightness had come over him. Bugger that, he’d thought angrily, he wasn’t some mooning maid waiting for love poems from some buggering bard. But he had been waiting.

_You can know. Someone has to know. I want to scream the words out from the top of the keep and have the sea bring crashing them back to the shoreline. I want to shriek out like a raven carrying the words bound around my talons. I want to write them on the wall to the North in hundred foot high letters. I want dragons to score them into the woods and forests with fire. I do not love him. I hate him! And one day he will be my husband and I will never be able to tell anyone that his touch sickens me, and that I mourn for a dream I once had of a husband who would love me and cherish me. Who would save me and protect me. I dreamt of a man with honour. And I know you mock me. You scorn me for praying for a knight’s arms. And his lips. I have found but one friend in the keep. One man who has taken me up in his arms and kept me from the rats and the lions… and eased the awful fear of being silent forever._

Praying for a knight’s arms… for his lips. He had run calloused fingertips over those words. What was she saying? Was she mad?! Had she finally lost herself in fantasies and fairy tales?

And ‘the awful fear of being silent forever’… what did that mean?! The little bird still chirped her pleasantries as she wended through the gardens or was made to stand at court. Since the first letter came she had not changed one little bit. Certainly, she never mentioned the letters she’d written. But that was smart of her at least.

_It is dangerous to write such things. Stop._

But still the small letters came.

_I cannot stop. I cannot stop thinking of the riot and the blood and the men. I cannot stop thinking of you reaching for me. Your armour was covered all over in their gore and I did not care. I cannot stop thinking of after, when you must have taken the armour off. Were you sore from wielding your sword? Do your muscles ache when you finish fighting, as my heart aches when I return from court and remove mine own armour? Was your undershirt dirtied by the sweat and blood? I wonder who in the keep washes your things. I have maids who take my things away, maids who return them freshly washed and sweet smelling from the sea air that dried them. Who cares for you? Perhaps writing these words is dangerous. Perhaps I can only think them because I have the parchment to put them on and no mouth to speak them out loud. I cannot be silent any more. Please do not be silent either._

She wanted his words, and hers unlocked them from him. He told her of his clothes of all things. How, yes, there was someone who came for his clothes. He never saw them, some serving girl perhaps who snuck in when the Hound was about the rest of the keep. Did they care for him? No, of course not, not if she meant a deeper meaning to that expression. But her question made him think dangerous things. Did she care for him…?

The next letter was a froth of details of her daily life, and she had also written out some of the small things she noticed around court. Did he know that the gravel in the gardens was in part made from sea shells? Sometimes she would find a whole shell there, buried amongst its shattered friends. Did he know that in Winterfell they grew blue roses in a special glass house? She liked the red roses of the south, but missed the blue. Did he know that the kennels here were grand stone buildings that reminded her of septs and castles, even though they were just for the hunting dogs…?

 _I know some of these things. But you are wrong._ He had written back. _The sea shells are not buried with their shattered friends. They are remaking themselves. The blue roses of the North are beautiful, but they are not there anymore... They came south with you, but are in a red disguise in case they are plucked up and cast down. The dogs are not in kennels, they are in palaces because they have their own kings and queens. In their eyes, we are the ones who live in squalor and mess._

He had not known that he had such ridiculous fancies within him until he’d found himself writing them out onto the page. But time went past and she did not reply, and he was afraid he had made himself too much of a moon mad loon and she was gone from him. 

And then just that day she had passed him briefly in a corridor, making her usual pleasantries as he tried hard to read her intent… and then he found another letter left behind her on the floor, folded in on its self so many times over. A ridiculous risk! But he found himself running back to his room to read…

_I find myself thinking on you. I find myself late at night thinking about the man they call a dog. I should not. I should not even write these things. But I wonder if you think on the little bird? Does your sleep evade you because you caught sight of her feathers that day? Do you consider her lips as she has begun considering yours? Do you ever wonder what she would be like with all the laces undone and the layers of silk let fall to the ground? Do you ever consider how she might be with all that armour removed, as she considers the removing of yours? Do you ever draw your sword, thinking of her gentle hand doing the same…?”_

He’d had to stop reading at that point. What was she… was she…? He reread those few lines and could not believe… but some part of him must have done, because he stirred in his breeches. His body believed even if his mind could not accept it. He read on.

_I do not know so very much of these things. I understand that training in the warrior's art is usually a long task. Many years spent as a squire to a knight, learning how to do exactly as pleases him. Learning how to keep his sword ready and well maintained. Learning just how he likes his saddle to be set for the ride._

He’d swallowed as he read those lines, his hand laying gently on his thigh as the other held the parchment. The temptation to free himself and to think more on the image of her being the one doing it… but he had held himself back.

_I have learnt many things since riding South. I have learnt silence, and I have learnt to sing whatever song is asked of me. But I have not yet learned how to care for my knight. Will you take me to squire, and teach me?_

It was the writing of his response to this last letter of hers that bothered him. It tied him up in knots as he still fought the temptation to take himself in hand. He had channelled the desire of doing that deed into words for her over and over again. Crude words. Words she would not like. Not pretty words, nor even fanciful words about shells, or roses, or dogs. He could not give her these words. They were as wrong as the b’s that had taken the place of the d’s in his early writings.

He sighed, running his hand over his face, feeling the roughness of his scars there. He was not pretty, no matter what thoughts had gotten into her head after his rescue of her. He was not pretty… but he didn’t have to be crude. The maester who’d beaten the words into him had also taught him manners and civilities for court, his father already thinking on when he’d be sent to serve the Lannisters. He had manners, he just chose not to use them. But for her…

He drew the parchment sheets back towards him, plunged the quill into ink again. And he wrote.

_If it please you, my lady._


End file.
